I’m oooooold! And I’m not happy! And I don’t like things now compared to the way they used to be. All this progress — phooey! In my day, we didn’t have these blogs and facebooks and twitters. We got all our local news from the newspaper. You’d have to wait a whole day, or sometimes two, just to find out what happened a block away. And you had ten year old kids throwin’ your paper in your trees and through your windows and you still had to pay ‘em every week. And that’s the way it was and we liked it!
Life was simpler then. There wasn’t all this concern about memes and editorial slants and stuff. It my days, if the paper made a mistake, we didn’t care. They’d run a correction two weeks later, stuck way back on page 10 in small type, and that made everything OK. Back in 1943 we thought Dewey was president for at least a month. When we learnt it wasn’t so, we just said, “Flobble-de-flee!” ’cause we were idiots and we didn’t know what else to say! And that’s the way it was and we liked it!
Life was a carnival! We didn’t need internet web sites for information. In my day, if there was snow outside, you tuned into WGY and listened to Don Weeks read the school closings for a half an hour. If you got distracted and weren’t listening when they got to your county, well too bad! You had to wait through an hour of cheesy 70’s music and then listen to it all over again. And that’s the way it was and we liked it that way!
Word-Press??? Flobble-de-flee! In my day, we believed everything Dan Rather said and never thought for a second he might be biased. We just believed whatever we were told because we were illiterate and ignorant and we didn’t know any better! Just a bunch o’ Cro-Magnons, gettin’ our news two days late, not knowin’ who’s president, listening to the school closings for hours, believin’ everything without question and that’s the way it was and we liked it! Weeeeeeee LOVED IT!
Please note, this was not written to offend any of my friends working in the “old media” industry : )
Love it.
Of course, if it wasn’t for the “old media,” no one would have anything to blog about!
Well, I’d only half agree with that. Certainly there are plenty of blogs that just churn out re-hashed stories or offer only commentary on already published stories. But I think there are also plenty of blogs with original, non-derivative content (ahem). The last article I wrote cited a couple newspaper stories, but was also used direct sources such as the Mayor of the Village of Corinth’s statements on the village web site (which itself is essentially a blog with original information direct from the mayor’s office), as well as the original reports from their dissolution study panel, which were available to download directly.
Hate to cut and paste but relevant to your exchange: http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/system/documents/1/original/Reconstruction_of_Journalism.pdf
American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of
dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way
to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed.
As almost everyone knows, the economic foundation of the nation’s newspapers,
long supported by advertising, is collapsing, and newspapers themselves, which
have been the country’s chief source of independent reporting, are shrinking—
literally. Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and the
hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last
third of the twentieth century, even as their primary audience eroded, is ending.
Commercial television news, which was long the chief rival of printed newspapers,
has also been losing its audience, its advertising revenue, and its reporting
resources.
Newspapers and television news are not going to vanish in the foreseeable
future, despite frequent predictions of their imminent extinction. But they will play
diminished roles in an emerging and still rapidly changing world of digital
journalism, in which the means of news reporting are being reinvented, the
character of news is being reconstructed, and reporting is being distributed across a
greater number and variety of news organizations, new and old. The questions that
this transformation raise are simple enough: What is going to take the place of
what is being lost, and can the new array of news media report on our nation and
our communities as well as—or better than—journalism has until now? More
importantly—and the issue central to this report—what should be done to shape
this new landscape, to help assure that the essential elements of independent,
original, and credible news reporting are preserved? We believe that choices made
now and in the near future will not only have far-reaching effects but, if the
choices are sound, significantly beneficial ones.